This week features my interview with scholar, writer & performer Dr. E. Patrick Johnson, author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, a collection of life stories from black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the southern United States. Traveling to every southern state, Johnson conducted interviews with more than seventy black gay men between the ages 19 and 93. He adapted his book into a hit one-person show, including a recent run in Chicago presented by Project&. With complexity and raw emotion, Sweet Tea humanizes a community often forced to the outskirts of society. Poignant and often heart-wrenching, Johnson reinforces the spoken-word tradition while challenging stereotypes and finding humor, humanity and hope within. “Sweet Tea is not a show fixed in history,” says Jane M. Saks, Project& President and Artistic Director, “it is a production of this moment, lending its voice to the necessary global conversations around race, sexuality and identity.”

Tune in to the show on Friday, June 26th at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET. Join the discussion on Facebook or Twitter. Sex Out Loud airs every Friday, you can listen along on your computer, tablet, or phone, find all the ways at SexOutLoudRadio.com.

E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He is also a Project& artist. He is the author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History. He is the editor of Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis by Dwight Conquergood and co-editor (with Mae G. Henderson) of Black Queer Studies—A Critical Anthology and (with Ramon Rivera-Servera) of solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays and Blaktino Queer Performance. In 2009, he translated Sweet Tea into a full-length stage play, Sweet Tea—The Play. The show has been co-produced by Jane M. Saks and Project& with the following theaters: About Face Theater (Chicago); Signature Theatre (Arlington, VA); Durham Arts Council (Durham, NC); Towne Street Theater (Los Angeles), and the Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts at Northwestern University.

This week on Sex Out Loud I am live with award-winning sex educator, writer, scholar, and activist, Bianca Laureano who is the co-founder of the Women of Color Sexual Health Network (WOCSHN); co-founder of The LatiNegr@s Project, and co-director of the film BLACK PERVERT. We talk about her journey to field of sexual education, coalition building among educators, the creation of WOCSHN, and her upcoming documentary project on race, kink, and community. We’ll also discuss negative and harmful stereotypes about community, culture, and sexuality and how she works to challenge them.

Tune in to Sex Out Loud this Friday, June 5th at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET. This week’s show is LIVE so call in to Voice America with questions and comments at 1-866-472-5788, join the discussion on Facebook or Twitter, or e-mail me via tristan(at)puckerup.com and I’ll read them live on the air. Tune in to Sex Out Loud every Friday, you can listen along on your computer, tablet, or phone, find all the ways at SexOutLoudRadio.com!

Bianca I Laureano is a first generation Puerto Rican who was born and raised in the Washington, DC metro area. The oldest daughter of an artist and educator, Bianca was raised in an activist environment that valued art in all its various and dynamic forms. At the beginning of high school Bianca’s parents encouraged her to become active in a youth led program called Raising Hispanic Academic Achievement, Inc. (RHAA), where she tutored and mentored Latin@ youth in the Washington, DC metro area. Bianca has been mentoring a young woman, Candy, for 17 years. Through RHAA Bianca developed critical skills and training as positive youth development was central to the program. Beginning as a tutor with RHAA, Bianca quickly became a part of the youth leadership and began assisting with program planning. She not only tutored and mentored on Saturday mornings, she arranged guest speakers, field trips and eventually co-led the all-female Saturday School in Silver Spring, MD, where the focus was on providing Latinas a space of their own to excel and find affirmation.

Bianca attended the University of Maryland, College Park (UM) and graduated in 2000 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Individual Studies: Women’s Health and Latino Communities. While at UM Bianca was active in peer education and mentoring programs through the University Health Center and became the Assistant Coordinator for Sexual Health Programs. The summer of 2000 she spent in Xhualtez, Espita in the Yucatan working with one of the first government funded health centers that provides western trained physicians and indigenous Mayan healers as a part of holistic health care. Upon her return she attended New York University and received her Master of Arts degree in Human Sexuality Education in 2002.

After spending one year with the Child Welfare League of America as the Program Manager of Adolescent Sexuality, Pregnancy Prevention and Parenting, Bianca began working on her second Master of Arts degree at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Department of Women’s Studies. Bianca’s research areas include Latina feminisms, Puerto Rican studies, sexuality, youth and media culture. Her training in feminist theory and intersectionality were developed at the Consortium on Race, Gender & Ethnicity where she was a CrISP Fellow. In 2006 Bianca received her second Master of Arts degree in Women’s Studies where her focus included race and racialization, bodies, gender, and sexualities.

While at the UM, Bianca continued to be involved in direct action and activism with a grassroots not-for-profit organization called Visions in Feminism (ViF). ViF is a collective of activists who work to create a low-cost, accessible national conference devoted to creating a space to discuss complex topics facing modern feminism. During her last year in the Washington, DC metro area, Bianca became involved with a group of young professional women who were all devoted to eliminating cervical cancer through HPV education. Bianca became the Director of Sexual Health for Tamika and Friends, Inc., (T&F) in 2005 and worked to create peer education handbooks and training’s for people interested in having HPV (House Parties of fiVe) parties. T&F is one of the first organizations to focus on educating men and youth regarding HPV and cervical cancer and that provides technical assistance and survivor support.

Currently residing in New York City, Bianca lives in the Bronx and provides consultation, capacity building and training, and facilitation to organizations dedicated to helping youth reach their full potential. She enjoys live music and concerts, the independent movie scene, museums, a good flea market, traveling, reading, dancing to dope beats, the beach, and is a fierce karaoke performer.

Bianca has published one book and several articles. She has presented both locally and internationally on various topics concerning activism, Latin@ sexual health, feminisms, youth and Hip-Hop culture, Latin@s and race, curriculum development, and teaching. An award-winning sexologist, Bianca was awarded the 2010 Mujeres Destacadas Award by El Diario/La Prensa for her work in sexuality and Latin@ communities. Bianca is an instructor at a private college, a freelance writer, abortion doula, and radical educator.

This week’s episode is a necessary conversation on a complex topic. Angel, Brecklyn, and Mollena Williams discuss race, racism, and various issues that Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) face in BDSM communities. They tackle the controversy surrounding International Ms. Leather 2015, inclusivity in the kink world, how social media has changed the way we talk about race, the concept of colorblindness, practical advice for white allies, and “the luxury of discomfort.” Recorded live at International Ms. Leather 2015 in San Jose.

Tune in Friday, May 8 at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET. Join the discussion on Facebook or Twitter. Tune in to Sex Out Loud every Friday, you can listen along on your computer, tablet, or phone, find all the ways at SexOutLoudRadio.com.

Angel is a trans gender defiant queer, whose passion lies in educating, advocating and coaching folks to sexual and intimate fulfillment. Angel is committed to social justice and a fully realized and intersectional sex positivity.

Brecklyn is an East Coast-raised stone butch dyke and boy. He’s been active in the leather and kink community over the past 5 years and outside that has facilitated workshops on topics including anti-oppression, trauma, and organic farming. He especially likes to connect with other queer and trans people of color and can be reached on FetLife at theory_nowpractice.

photo by Don Sir Photography

Owned by “Herr Meister,” (her beloved Maestro, an internationally acclaimed composer) Mollena Williams currently serves as Muse and slave in his heart and home. For her part, she’s an award-winning, critically acclaimed writer, actress, BDSM Educator, and storyteller. She is author of The Toybag Guide: Taboo Play and co-author of Playing Well With Others: Your Guide to Discovering, Exploring and Navigating the Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities. Her perspectives on BDSM are frequently sought after by news sources such as The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Newsweek, Essence, and Ebony, and is a frequent guest expert on Dan Savage’s Savage Lovecast.

Her essays appear in Tristan Taormino’s The Ultimate Guide to Kinky Sex and a bunch of the Best Sex Writing books. She’s a featured educator with KinkAcademy.com. Her award-winning experimental short BDSM film “IMPACT” debuted at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and has screened in the USA, Canada, Europe and Australia in Cinekink 2013, as well as indie film festivals across North America, Europe and Australia.

She is International Ms. Leather 2010 and Ms. SF Leather 2009, was honored with the 2012 Jack McGeorge Award for Excellence in Education in BDSM, and is thrilled to have won the National Leather Association’s 2011 and 2012 Cynthia Slater Non-Fiction Article Award and shared the 2013 Geoff Mains Non-Fiction book award for Playing Well with Others.

This special issue of Porn Studies will promote a discussion about race in the study of pornography. Race remains an underdeveloped area of research in porn studies, and employing racial analytics to the study of pornography’s historical, representational, market, labor, industrial, and technological production is imperative for the field. Race is crucial for the field because it allows us to think through power relations that function in concert with gender, sexuality, and class, to uncover the historical importance of unequal looking relations, labor relations, and access to media authorship, and to reveal the ways in which desire, sexual and otherwise, is inextricably bound to processes of racialization.

A critical racial optic illuminates the interests, desires, and experiences of racialized minorities as they are portrayed in, mobilize, or labor within pornographic fields. This mode of analysis may draw upon the theoretical scholarship of critical race scholars, women of color feminists, and queer of color critique as well as on the emerging field of porn studies scholarship to think through the fantasies, energies, connectivities, pleasures, and power relations embedded in racial pornographies. Another function of a racial optics is to expose the rise of colorblindness or postracial ideologies in popular media discourses and academic theories about pornography, even as race is ever more salient to adult industries in a neoliberal era.

In addition, this special issue of Porn Studies will highlight research that launches pornographics as a framework for examining cultural productions and social relations outside of the genre and industry of pornography. Increasingly, scholars have drawn on pornography as a lens to problematize racial, gender, and sexual discourses, structures, and economies in ways that reveal the utility of pornographics as a mode of cultural inquiry that exceeds the formal confines of adult entertainment industries and networks of particular erotic communities. The goal of this special issue is to read the labor of race in pornography or pornographics, and the labor of pornography or pornographics in race.

Finally, although this is a scholarly journal we welcome essays, interviews, and creative pieces from academics, artists, activists, and adult industry practitioners.

About Porn Studies

New in 2014, Porn Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal, which publishes original research examining specifically sexual and explicit media forms, their connections to wider media landscapes and their links to the broader spheres of (sex) work across historical periods and national contexts.

This Friday we have a special encore presentation on Sex Out Loud of one of our most popular episodes, featuring Mollena Williams. Mollena Williams is simply one of the most intelligent and articulate BDSM educators of her generation, and we get to spend the entire hour picking her perverted brain! We will talk about the two chapters on roleplay she wrote for my book The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge. She’ll explain the complex elements of race play, where kinky people play out racist scenarios, use racial epithets, or eroticize racial power dynamics. Mollena will reveal why she is turned on by this controversial kink and other kinds of taboo fantasies. Plus, I’ll ask her about what it’s like to be a woman of color who enjoys being a submissive and a collared slave. Read all about Mollena Williams below, including a list of appearances in the next few months.

She is deeply honored and profoundly humbled to have been selected to receive the 2012 Jack McGeorge Award for Excellence in Education by Black Rose, and is thrilled to have won the National Leather Association’s 2012 Cynthia Slater Non-Fiction Article Award. She was a finalist for the 21st annual Pantheon of Leather’s Woman of the Year & Northern California Regional Awards. You can watch her being interviewed for the Women’s Leather History Project, as curated by the Leather Archives and Museum.

Exploring kink since 1993, active in BDSM and the Leather Community since 1996, and presenting classes since 1998, she speaks at Leather, BDSM and Kink events across the US, Europe and Canada on many Leather and BDSM focused topics. She also brings the knowledge on Kink, BDSM and Leather to such august institutions of higher learning as SF State and Cal State, Harvard, Princeton,Yale, Stamford, and Brown for IvyQ. She has been invited to present this fall for MIT.

Mollena’s been sober since 3-14-2007 and in December that same year, she founded “Safeword,” a 12-step based recovery group for all kinksters seeking recovery from addiction.

International Ms Leather 2010 was truly an international title year with visits to the Pride Festival in Stockholm, Sweden, where she made history as the first Leatherwoman ever invited to march with the venerable Scandinavian Leathermen’s Association! She’s also done her thing in Dublin, Ireland, Berlin, Germany, the UK: toured Amsterdam, Netherlands for Leather Pride, as well as teaching and performing in Vancouver, Canada. A roll-up of her epic IMsL 2010 title year can be found here!

Her background includes a lifetime of training and involvement in the performing arts, which include spoken word, classical theater, dance, performance art, and all manner of stagecraft. Performingprofessionally since the age of 5, her credits include singing on the soundtrack for the movie The Wiz and co-starring with Danny Bonaduce in the underground cult-classic America’s Deadliest Home Video.Her first solo show,69Stories: One Pervert’s Tale has been re-revived and was a hit in Vancouver BC in November 2010 and Madison, Wisconsin July 2012. You can see an excerpt from it here (“Kiss My Boots” part One, and Part Two) as performed at Rachel Kramer Bussel’s In the Flesh storytelling series. She is a favorite at Dixie De La Tour’s Bawdy Storytelling, has performed for many storytelling venues including Bare! Stories, Tiny, Dangerous Fun Audacia Ray’s Red Umbrella Diaries, Carol Queen’s Perverts Put Out, and was a guest on Kevin Allison’s Risk! Podcast. She has also thrown down onstage for Porchlight Storytelling and is looking forward to an upcoming appearance on NPR’s Snap Judgement.

I recently appeared on the podcast Afroerotik, along with Dr. Cherie Ann Turpin, to have an in-depth conversation about race and sexuality. We talked about the implications and effects of continued stereotypes and racism in the adult industry and the how it affects perceptions in society. If you missed it, go listen to it now!

Take it slow. Talk to your partner. And don’t forget, just because you start off with strap-on play, doesn’t mean you have to end there, also, just because you start with anything else, doesn’t mean you can’t end with strap-on play.

Mollena Williams – our guest for this Friday’s episode of Sex Out Loud – is simply one of the most intelligent and articulate BDSM educators of her generation, and we get to spend the entire hour picking her perverted brain! We will talk about the two chapters on roleplay she wrote for my book The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge. She’ll explain the complex elements of race play, where kinky people play out racist scenarios, use racial epithets, or eroticize racial power dynamics. Mollena will reveal why she is turned on by this controversial kink and other kinds of taboo fantasies. Plus, I’ll ask her about what it’s like to be a woman of color who enjoys being a submissive and a collared slave. Read all about Mollena Williams below, including a list of appearances in the next few months.

She is deeply honored and profoundly humbled to have been selected to receive the 2012 Jack McGeorge Award for Excellence in Education by Black Rose, and is thrilled to have won the National Leather Association’s 2012 Cynthia Slater Non-Fiction Article Award. She was a finalist for the 21st annual Pantheon of Leather’s Woman of the Year & Northern California Regional Awards. You can watch her being interviewed for the Women’s Leather History Project, as curated by the Leather Archives and Museum.

Exploring kink since 1993, active in BDSM and the Leather Community since 1996, and presenting classes since 1998, she speaks at Leather, BDSM and Kink events across the US, Europe and Canada on many Leather and BDSM focused topics. She also brings the knowledge on Kink, BDSM and Leather to such august institutions of higher learning as SF State and Cal State, Harvard, Princeton,Yale, Stamford, and Brown for IvyQ. She has been invited to present this fall for MIT.

Mollena’s been sober since 3-14-2007 and in December that same year, she founded “Safeword,” a 12-step based recovery group for all kinksters seeking recovery from addiction.

International Ms Leather 2010 was truly an international title year with visits to the Pride Festival in Stockholm, Sweden, where she made history as the first Leatherwoman ever invited to march with the venerable Scandinavian Leathermen’s Association! She’s also done her thing in Dublin, Ireland, Berlin, Germany, the UK: toured Amsterdam, Netherlands for Leather Pride, as well as teaching and performing in Vancouver, Canada. A roll-up of her epic IMsL 2010 title year can be found here!

Her background includes a lifetime of training and involvement in the performing arts, which include spoken word, classical theater, dance, performance art, and all manner of stagecraft. Performingprofessionally since the age of 5, her credits include singing on the soundtrack for the movie The Wiz and co-starring with Danny Bonaduce in the underground cult-classic America’s Deadliest Home Video.Her first solo show,69Stories: One Pervert’s Tale has been re-revived and was a hit in Vancouver BC in November 2010 and Madison, Wisconsin July 2012. You can see an excerpt from it here (“Kiss My Boots” part One, and Part Two) as performed at Rachel Kramer Bussel’s In the Flesh storytelling series. She is a favorite at Dixie De La Tour’s Bawdy Storytelling, has performed for many storytelling venues including Bare! Stories, Tiny, Dangerous Fun Audacia Ray’s Red Umbrella Diaries, Carol Queen’s Perverts Put Out, and was a guest on Kevin Allison’s Risk! Podcast. She has also thrown down onstage for Porchlight Storytelling and is looking forward to an upcoming appearance on NPR’s Snap Judgement.

My head is still spinning from my first appearance on Melissa Harris-Perry on Saturday. Watch it below or at these links—Segment 1: Porn in America and Segment 2: The Business of Pornography. I’ve done a fair amount of television appearances, and I have mixed feelings about them. In the past, I feel like many TV producers shy away from difficult topics, don’t allow for complex, nuanced analysis, and often want me to “dumb it down.” This time, none of that happened. I was excited when a producer for the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC contacted me last week about a show about female sexuality and porn. We had a spirited conversation where I feel like she really listened to me, rather than attempted to fit me into a quasi-script she had already written. When I found out that one of my co-panelists was author and activist Jaclyn Friedman, I felt relieved to have a sex-positive feminist sister there.

Fun fact: Jaclyn Friedman and I were both in the class of ’93 at Wesleyan University, and we were fellow activists and friends during college. Although we’ve followed and supported each other’s careers since then (I blurbed her newest book What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame Free Guide to Sex and Safety and she appeared on my radio show Sex Out Loud), we hadn’t been in the same room since the late 90s. We had dinner the night before, and Jaclyn reminded me we wouldn’t talk about the show, so that everything would stay fresh for the next day. We had plenty of catching up to do, so it didn’t matter!

At every stage of the booking process, the folks behind the scenes at MHP were competent, respectful, and, well, have their shit together. In the green room before the show, Jaclyn and I met Zephyr Lookout (author of Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics) who sat on the panel for an earlier segment and would be joining ours. She is a law professor at Fordham. I liked her immediately, and we bonded over our love of the children’s book Tuck Everlasting. She admitted she was “probably the most anti-porn of everyone on the panel,” which I appreciated her saying up front. It’s actually refreshing to engage with someone who really wants to dig into the topic and isn’t just ready to shut you down (like Gail Dines and crew are). After being fitted with our mics and mic packs (during which Jaclyn had her hands all the way up my dress to assist the sound guy), the three of us sat down at the table. That’s when I met the fourth panelist, Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson (author of Holler If You Hear Me), and I truly had no idea what he was going to say about porn. I was pleasantly surprised to discover he knows quite a bit about it (he name checked Lexington Steele and Mr. Marcus!) and had smart things to say.

MHP introduced me as a feminist pornographer and showed the cover of my new book The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, co-edited with Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young and forthcoming from The Feminist Press at CUNY in 2013. The two segments just flew by so fast, and suddenly, she was doing the closing of the show (naming activist teen Julia Bluhm the Foot Soldier of the Week for petitioning Seventeen magazine).

Afterward, we all stood in the hallway, continuing the conversation, and I got to meet several more of the show’s producers including Jamil Smith and Executive Producer Shirley Zilberstein. Melissa Harris-Perry is so smart, it’s actually intimidating. But in a good way. Obviously, we barely scratched the surface on some pretty important topics. I have a whole lot more to say about race politics in the porn industry, shifting representations of sexuality in porn, today’s porn economy, queer porn, and on and on. But this was definitely a start, and great one.

Very few mainstream media outlets, and even fewer, if any, television news shows are willing to look at porn in an intelligent or balanced way. I am so impressed that Melissa Harris-Perry and her producers took a risk and really broke down a barrier. I know they have already gotten flack about it from conservatives and anti-porn feminists. So, if you want to show your support for the topic of this show, applaud Melissa Harris-Perry and MSNBC for making space for this conversation, you can do so in a number of ways:

Performer and activist Ignacio Rivera joins me this Friday, July 6th at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET for a nuanced discussion about some highly charged subjects. Ignacio, who prefers the pronoun they, will talk about their gender identity and how it impacts their sexuality. We will discuss polyamory in people of color communities, race politics and racially-charged fantasies in the kink world, and how to create a truly inclusive, multi-racial community event. Then Ignacio will look at the challenges of their starring role in the feature film Mommy is Coming and reveal what it was like to work with acclaimed indie director Cheryl Dunye. This episode was recorded live during the OpenSF Conference in San Francisco and includes an audio excerpt of Ignacio’s co-keynote presentation with Yosenio Lewis.

Ignacio Rivera aka Papí Coxxx identifies as a Queer, Trans, Two-Spirit, polyamorous, kinky, Black-Boricua. Ignacio, who prefers the gender-neutral pronoun “they,” is a lecturer, activist, filmmaker, sex educator, sex worker, and performance artist, sharing spoken word, one-person shows, and storytelling internationally. Their work has appeared in ColorLines, Ebony, Yellow Medicine Review, The Ultimate Guide to Kink and in their chapbooks, Las Alas, co-authored by Maceo Cabrera Estévez; Ingridients; and Thoughts, Rants and What Some Might Call Poetry. Ignacio is the recipient of a Marsha A. Gómez Cultural Heritage Award from LLEGÓ: The National Latina/o Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Organization. Ignacio is one of the founding board members of Queers for Economic Justice; they are also the founder of Poly Patao Productions. Ignacio has been facilitating workshops, doing lectures and creating events for kinky, kinky-curious Queer/Trans POCs and their white queer and trans allies for over a decade.